Constantinescu, Ioana R (2003) The role of verb-transitivity preference in sentence processing by reading disabled adolescents. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
The influence of verb-transitivity preference in sentence processing was investigated in two self-paced reading experiments with normal and reading disabled readers. Experiment 1 compared reading times of Learning Disabled (LD) adolescents diagnosed with reading disabilities with those of normal college students. Experiment 2 compared another group of LD adolescents with reading disabilities with age-matched normal readers. Preferred-transitive (e.g., visit ) and preferred-intransitive (e.g., walked ) verbs were inserted into transitive (e.g., The child visited/walked his dog ) and intransitive (e.g., The child visited/walked with his friends ) syntactic frames. The results from the normal control groups showed an interaction between verb preference and sentence type and a significant difference between verb preferences in transitive frames. The results from the LD groups showed only a significant difference between verb preference in the transitive contexts in Experiment 1 but no difference between verb types in Experiment 2. The pattern of results from the normal readers supports a version of the lexicalist approach in parsing. According to this approach, sentence parsing is primarily determined by the nature of verb-syntactic frames. The pattern of results from the LD groups suggests a tendency for a verb-syntactic deficit in reading disability.
|Divisions:||Concordia University > Faculty of Arts and Science > Psychology|
|Item Type:||Thesis (Masters)|
|Authors:||Constantinescu, Ioana R|
|Pagination:||ix, 121 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm.|
|Degree Name:||Theses (M.A.)|
|Thesis Supervisor(s):||de Almeida, Roberto G.|
|Deposited By:||Concordia University Libraries|
|Deposited On:||27 Aug 2009 17:26|
|Last Modified:||08 Dec 2010 15:25|
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